 In the days following the tragic suicide bombings in Beirut and the horrific attacks in Paris in mid-November, peacebuilders from 12 countries met in Helsinki to share and jointly reflect on their peace and dialogue initiatives. The common thread was their creation of safe spaces and safety nets – known as “Common Spaces.” These spaces serve multiple purposes, from hosting confidential dialogues among leaders in deeply divided societies to supporting formal negotiations in peace and constitutional reform processes. With the emergence of these sustained dialogue initiatives following long periods of civil war or during intractable conflicts, we are witnessing the creation of groundbreaking joint mechanisms that simultaneously help catalyze, accompany and support fundamental political and social change processes in divided societies.
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Evolving Common Spaces: Building common understanding and develop consensus through knowledge-based dialogues, the creation of shared knowledge, and the evolving of permanent safe spaces -- A presentation by Hannes Siebert at the Rotary Peace Fellowship 10 year anniversary in Thailand, 2015
Over the past 15 years we’ve witnessed the emergence of several unique Track 1.5 initiatives following long periods of civil wars, governance system failures, political instability, or during intractable conflicts. They served as “safe spaces ” for confidential dialogues or as support mechanisms and safety nets for formal and constitutional change processes. The development of each of these common spaces was determined by the dynamics of the conflict, the depth of the broken relations between groups, the failures of existing constitutional and governing instruments, competing interests and the breakdown in communications. In this presentation he briefly look at five of these dialogue spaces in Cyprus, Lebanon, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar ND Conference Workshop D on Tuesday 17 November 2015: Building capacity for self-mediation, deadlock-breaking, consensus-building and people’s participatory processes into the change mechanisms |
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